Header Compression (HC) designs the coding of the Headers so as to reduce the overhead of the packets, and thus diminish the bandwidth use of a wireless link. The purpose of the HC algorithm is to improve on the ratio of the signaling vs. the payload for a packet.
As address space, or any other part of the header increases, the importance of compressing the header size also increases. Also, the bandwidth bottleneck in the future internet is the wireless link. It is predicted that in the year 2002, the number of hand-held computers is going to overtake the number of the traditional PCs. Thus, as optical networks makes bandwidth cheap on the wired link, the untethered channels are becoming more and more crowded. What is needed is a way to compress the header size to work over wireless links.